Chief Executive’s overview

Mark Perry

With the world having changed so much over this last year, I think it’s made many of us really take stock of what matters most in life. And for me at the heart of this is being kind and caring, realising that everyone has faced varying degrees of challenge.

This is where genuine empathy, understanding and support can make a real difference. It’s something we’ve continued to talk about openly in our business, and has helped us focus on what more we can do moving forward, over and above what we’ve done before.

We’re here for the long-term, and the last year has reinforced that through good times and bad, there’s a central role we at VIVID can provide in helping people improve their life chances and supporting communities to thrive. Mike has made clear many of the challenges we have faced this year and I’m immensely proud of what we’ve achieved to support our customers, communities and each other. A large focus has been managing our response to COVID-19 but it’s also been so much more. Our financial strength has given us a huge opportunity to provide extra investment to our localities and neighbourhoods, and even more support. For example, we’ve helped our local authority partners by providing temporary accommodation for rough sleepers. And I’m delighted to have launched VIVID Plus, our new charitable arm, which will enable us to channel what we do to deliver the very best social outcomes possible for individuals and communities.

Throughout the year we helped customers access more than £5.7m in benefits or income they were entitled to, helped 589 customers back into work and over 600 customers with their digital skills to give them access to online products and services they’d otherwise be excluded from – all this support being so important to ensure customers can maintain their tenancies and improve their wellbeing, especially when faced with particularly challenging circumstances.

We know our neighbourhoods and communities well, and we have the strength of partnerships and resources to achieve the best we can for them. Our tight-knit location across Hampshire and 3 adjoining counties also gives us the ability to involve and engage with our customers in a wide range of ways, to listen and understand what matters most to them, hear their opinions and for them to help us shape how our services are designed and run. We value this partnership and it ensures we put customers at the heart of everything we do.

A safe and secure home is a right everyone should have and it’s also a lot more than purely the four walls we live in. It’s the green space around it, the community facilities it has, the people we interact with and the opportunities and enterprise that brings. The focus of our annual stakeholder event this year was “A new era of life in town centres” with well-known retail consultant Mary Portas sharing her thoughts on the renewed importance of ‘local’. She also talked about “The kindness economy” where kindness is no longer a nice to have but a necessity encompassing empathy, connection, community, home and putting people first. This really struck a chord with me as I said at the start, and it’s something we’ve continually reinforced whether for our customers or colleagues, to support each other and to be mindful what others may be going through.

There are many factors influencing the direction our business takes. We’ve revisited our plans to reflect where society is today, what the future holds and the even greater role we can play to meet the needs of our customers and communities working in partnership with others.

You can read more on our plans here covering our approaches to building safety, mapping our way to a carbon zero future, and the strength of our development performance to continue delivering more affordable homes across a range of tenures.

My 900 colleagues have shown outstanding resilience throughout a difficult year balancing home, work and caring responsibilities. We transitioned well to remote working, our trade staff have shown amazing commitment delivering our essential frontline repairs services with safety and hygiene measures in place – all this resulting in improvement to the majority of our performance measures including customer satisfaction of 80.4%. We know there are still areas to improve on and we’ll continue to develop our skills, methods and technology to enable the best customer experience possible.

It’s incredible the journey we’ve been on, continuing to demonstrate our progress, resilience, our capacity and energy to meet our ambitions. On behalf of my executive team, I’d like to thank our customers, partners and people for your ongoing support. I’d also like to pay a special thanks to Mike Kirk for his time as Chair. Mike successfully led the Board and its creation during our merger in 2017, providing the steer and challenge to create the leading housing association we are today. He leaves a fantastic legacy for our new Chair, Charles Alexander, to take forward.

Mark Perry